The Global Novel: a literature podcast
The Global Novel is a podcast that surveys the narratology of world literature and history of translation from antiquity to modernity with a critical lens and aims to make academic education in literature accessible to the world.
The Global Novel: a literature podcast
The Island: War and Belonging in Auden's England
W.H. Auden is the modernist poet who coined the term “the age of anxiety” and is noted for his stylistic and technical achievement. His work intellectually engaged with politics, morals, love and religion. With us today is our distinguished guest, Professor Nicholas Jenkins. Prof. Jenkins teaches English literature at Stanford University and will soon be the director of the Stanford Creative Writing Program. He is also the literary executor of the ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein, the creator of the Kindred Britain website, and the author of the critically acclaimed book The Island: War and Belonging in Auden's England, published by Harvard University Press.
Recommended Reading:
Selected Poems of W. H. Auden(1991)
The Island: War and Belonging in Auden's England (2024)
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original video: (https://youtu.be/_vZT5AHSuPk?si=KMvmbbfOpqAaWeWK)
I believe that Auden thought somewhere inside himself that the novel was a more altruistic and less egotistical form, and there are certainly plenty of critics from Bakhtin onwards who have absolutely thought the same thing. Poetry was not dialogical enough, maybe even thought that, and novelists were a little saner than poets and poetry. And I think what might be happening here is that he was in some ways protecting himself against this Dionysian quality that, at least in my eyes, is part of what his way of writing poetry was about.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to the Global Novel, where we journey through the vast landscape of world literature. I'm your host, claire Hennessey, and today we're diving deep into one of the 20th century's most interesting and controversial poets of modernity, wh Auden, who coined the term the Age of Anxiety and is noted for his stylistic and technical achievement. And we're not alone on this expedition. With us today is our distinguished guest, professor Nicholas Jenkins. Professor Jenkins teaches English literature at Stanford University and will soon be the director of the Stanford Creative Writing Program. He's also the literary executor of the ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein, the creator of the Kindred Britain website, and the author of the ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein, the creator of the Kindred Britain website, and the author of the critically acclaimed book the Island War and Belonging in Auden's England, published by Harvard University Press. Hello, professor Jenkins, it's an absolute honor to have you with us today.
Speaker 1:Hello Clara. It's lovely to be on the show with you. Thank you so much for inviting me to talk with you about Auden.
Speaker 2:Well, your extensive work on Auden has shed new light on his life and poetry. So before we dive into the intricacies of Auden's verse, could you share with us what initially drew you to his work and what makes Auden such a compelling figure in literature?
Speaker 1:Yes, I think, like many of the things that are important that happen to a person in life, it happened in stages and I didn't really know it was happening. For a long time I didn't know Auden personally. He died before I read a poem, let alone a poem by him and so when I got to university I read some poems by Auden that I liked, but I read a lot of other poetry as well, by other people that I liked just as much, and so I didn't have any really strong sense of that I was going to end up working on Auden's poetry and on his career. I did have some professors at university who had written about Auden and who were experts on Auden. I was interested in what they had to say, just because it's always wonderful to hear somebody who really knows about something talk about it.
Speaker 1:Then I came to the United States on a fellowship and had my fellowship in New York, and while I was there I met a number of people who had known Ordon as a person, and these people were, in almost all cases, fascinating, interesting people in their own right. They had some funny stories to tell about Auden and his life. I was lucky enough also to meet the person that you mentioned a few moments ago, claire Lincoln Kirstein, who was probably Auden's closest friend in New York for the last 30 years of Auden's life. Lincoln was an extraordinary and important cultural figure in his own right, with hugely intelligent, experienced, fascinating viewpoints on the world that he helped me understand Auden's poetry. And I would say the fundamental reason for that is because there is always a gap between the social and historical person, or the physiological, biological reality of a person any person, including Auden and then that inner personality that the author's creators manifest perhaps more clearly in their writing or their medium of their art than they do in their everyday lives. So it was only when I got to do some work with Professor Edward Mendelson of Columbia in New York, who is Auden's literary executor and a man with an enormous breadth of knowledge about Auden, that I began to feel like, oh, I really see something here that I feel like I could understand better and make a contribution to.
Speaker 1:And so it was, paradoxically, it was only when I sort of moved away from personal knowledge of Auden through the mediated, through these friends of Auden's that I've met in New York, that I felt I got closer to the poet, and at that point I.
Speaker 1:I did become very interested and I noticed something that perhaps is relevant to mention just in the context of doing research about any historical figure, which is that it can seem overwhelming when there's a large body of work that's already been published about any figure like Auden or any other great writer or artist can seem overwhelming, there's nothing more to say.
Speaker 1:I think that's the opposite of the truth, and I noticed in Ordon's case and I would bet that it's true of other cases as well that there's always an enormous amount to discover that's lying pretty close to hand, that either hasn't been seen or has been forgotten about or needs to be thought about in a different way. And so I realized, as I started to get very interested in Auden, that there was also a lot to say about Auden that hadn't been said before, both in terms of his poetry, his work, the place that he poured, the really intense energy, creative energy of his being, but also just learning stuff about him, his views of the world and his life, from his letters, from interviews, from transcripts of readings and conversations that he'd given. So actually I feel like there's always a lot more to find out about even somebody who's become now a central part of 20th century poetic history and I felt privileged to be able to just spend some time doing that.
Speaker 2:Great, great Well. Regarding Auden as one of the literary voices of the era, you mentioned that understanding Auden's poetry involves listening to other voices from his time. So how do writers like Wyndham Lewis and TS Eliot help us better appreciate Auden's relationship with and his contributions to literary modernism? And through Auden's work, what insights can we gain into this larger picture of the modernist movement? What insights can we gain into this?
Speaker 1:larger picture of the modernist movement. It's a crucial question and I think it's important for us, just as we start to dig into it a little bit for the benefit of people who may just be coming to the term literary modernism, to just for me to give a kind of thumbnail sketch of what I understand literary modernism to be, particularly in the poetic context. So I think it's all these different things in different places in cultural history, different geographical places, but also different mediums. So poetic modernism for me, as Auden would have understood it, I think, has to do with a focus on the modern city. Modernism has a lot to do with anxiety about modernity. It's very cosmopolitan, usually in its cultural coordinates, in being obsessed with the metropolis. I think that it's very, very different as a way of writing poetry and as a focus for poetry from a lot of the previous history of, certainly, english literature, and it's also written by people who have a very kind of cosmopolitan outlook on the world, which again, is unfortunately not always true of many of the writers who are storied figures in English literary history. So modernism involves too, a willingness to experiment and try and write poems in different ways, not just continue to write tidy little box-like poems that rhyme and scan neatly, but to break up all kinds of regular and expected patterns of structuring poetry and look for other ways to make a poem respond to the unprecedented moment that these writers felt that they were living in. So I thinken absorbed some of that and the figures that were most important to him I would say I mean there's a whole galaxy of poetic modernists, including people like Marianne Moore, ezra Pound, wallace Stevens, gertrude Stein, but for me anyway, the two figures that really deeply influenced Auden's imagination were the Irish poet, WP Yeats, and the poet who was born in the States but living in England for most of his adult life, ts Eliot.
Speaker 1:And above all TS Eliot, I think, was a reference point for Auden and it's sort of natural to think that young writers, like Auden was in the 1920s, would look to the most sophisticated experiments of the time. So Auden tried to write like a modernist poet in some of the ways that I just described, and it didn't really work for him. He wrote some quite bad poems when he was trying to be his most modernist. I think in the end he went back to writing poems that are more traditionally structured, that often are centered on a single speaking voice, reacting to a world that is around that voice, that are not as experimental in their coordinates and also are more if I can use the term in all of its connotations more insular.
Speaker 1:And so Auden began to write in a way that looked a little bit more like what previous poetry had looked like, and in that he became, in a very strange way, a kind of forerunner, or maybe even a mentor, of TS Eliot, who was moving away from his internationalism and towards something that, again, was much more insular, much more devoted to local life, more devoted to local life, to an organic, largely imagined social world.
Speaker 1:And Eliot became a much more, so to speak, provincial writer in the 1930s and 1940s, and I would say that part of that is because he saw what younger poets, most notably Auden, were doing. So in a sense, the person who had started by teaching Auden ended up by the person who was being taught by him, and what that tells us in part about literary modernism is that it wasn't a once and for all revolution, it didn't just happen and change everything forever. It certainly was part of the history of poetry in English, just like it's part of the history of innumerable literatures around the world, but it wasn't an absolute thing and it became just an end point. It didn't become an end point, it became something that was a stage, a phase, and literature moved beyond it in the form that Auden was writing.
Speaker 2:Well, you also mentioned in your book that Auden's work reflects a turn into inwardness. You know that kind of parochialism. You just mentioned ruralism, for another example, the English countryside country, also having both meanings of rural and national. How does this inward ethos signal a shift, or even the ending of modernism, and what conditions fostered such a transition from outwardness to inwardness?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I think one of the things that a lot of people had somewhat easily assumed about Auden was that he was a very urbane writer, somebody who was very intellectual. Auden was an incredibly intelligent person, obviously, but I don't think that's really where the sources of his art come from. Person, obviously, but I don't think that's really where the sources of his art come from. And part of what I tried to write about in the Island was that Auden was actually a country boy. He grew up in the countryside, knew a lot about natural life. He's a very avid amateur naturalist. He was very well acquainted with the rural world, which has been a kind of bedrock feature of a lot of English poetry over hundreds and hundreds of years. But I think it wasn't simply a case of Auden being somebody who felt at home in the countryside, but it was also a turn away from modernism, the city, the world of international connections, and in that Auden was tracking something that was happening on a much, much larger scale in the period between the end of the First World War in 1918 and the beginning of the Second World War in 1939. So England, along with a lot of other countries, including the US, but also many countries in Europe began to be more inward turned, be more focused on its own problems, its own traditions.
Speaker 1:I think the strains of the empire were also beginning to manifest themselves very visibly as an unsustainable situation in Britain. And of course, there were a whole series of crises in the interwar period, the first of those crises being the aftermath of the war itself, which left so many people in a deeply traumatized state, including Ordon, and also financial crises in the 1930s. So there was a period in which many cultures became very inward, turned very insular to pick up the word that I use in the title of my book, the Island and I think Auden's preoccupations with insular themes were a kind of reflection or a prophetic, half-understood understanding of a track that at least English culture was taking itself during that period, and of course TS Eliot ended up following Auden in that trajectory too. So this was about something bigger than just personal preference or idiosyncrasy. This was about a change in the culture, one that, to a greater or lesser extent, is also very influential today in the UK.
Speaker 2:Right, as you just mentioned, that the word island is almost synonymous with insular and your book is titled the Island War and Belonging in Odin's England. Could you elaborate on what island symbolizes in the context of Auden's poetry and life?
Speaker 1:So the island is a word that has a deep history in iconography of the British Isles but more especially, in this case, in the iconography of English identity. And I think one of the things that I was writing about in the island alongside or within Auden was also Englishness, english identity. And there are innumerable poems and speeches by politicians in which England, which is not an island, it's part of an island or a group of islands, an archipelago. England envisions itself, or English people with an investment in English identity envision themselves as living on an island that's set somewhere off from the rest of the world, that is surrounded by sea and has his own separate story and, like an island does, which is somewhat related to the rest of the world but also somewhat separate from it.
Speaker 1:So the Victorian poet, laureate Tennyson, talked about an island story when he was talking about Englishness essentially, and that phrase got picked up and used by politicians, most notably or infamously, winston Churchill, who talked constantly about these islands, the island, the island story, picking up Tennyson's phrase from his poem.
Speaker 1:And so, at one level, the island is about the nature of the illusion within national identity that England is a place apart, separated off from the rest of the world and has its own unique, specific and very inward-facing characteristics.
Speaker 1:I think also I was saying that the kind of person that Auden was and the kind of poetry that he was writing were insular and that that was his way of understanding his social positioning. And I think maybe I was also gesturing towards the idea, which often comes to mind when you're reading poetry, that a poem set out on a page is like an island of type in a sea of white paper surrounding it. So I was thinking about multiple different levels of the term the island, and it's one that Auden uses a lot to talk about his home, the place that he imagines. In the end Auden gave all of those fantasies or illusions up, but for a long while, in the late 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s I think, he really was a kind of lyrical nationalist poet, and for an English lyrical nationalist poet that mythography of the island came very easily to hand.
Speaker 2:Contrast this with a later Auden who basically struggles with ordinary human unhappiness, as he wrote in his poems. Let's begin with the 18-year-old Auden, who identified with the condition of Shakespeare's character Calvin as a disinherited outcast. So why is this image in your book, the uncanny image of Auden as a iconoclast, so powerful throughout your book and argument, and why did this early stage of the poet as a rebel caught your scholarly attention?
Speaker 1:So I think there's always something interesting about outsiders. I think they're incredibly important to the health of a world, of a culture. Auden, for lots of different reasons having to do with um, just personal idiosyncrasies, I think did think of himself as a little bit of an outsider. Um, I think his sexuality also enforced that sense on him. Um, I think he probably also came from a background, a family background, that was a little bit different from most homes. His parents were very fascinating and neurotic, anxious, talented people, and so so I'm just I value outsiders. I think that the abjected one is a person who must never be forgotten.
Speaker 2:In the second half of this episode, professor Jenkins will talk about how to closely read Auden's poetry in a unique narrative arc. As long as Auden's rhetoric style and depth of artistry. To listen to the entire episode, we encourage you to subscribe at theglobalnovelcom slash subscribe. Thank you so much for listening.